History

Last summer I wrote about the the College Board’s new AP U.S. History (APUSH) framework and explained how it mandates a left-wing narrative for the teaching of American history to our top high school students. The teaching of American history is ground zero in the left’s battle to indoctrinate students. The new AP U.S. History framework is the left’s ultimate weapon in this battle. Now 55 leading American history scholars »

The replica of Barbara Fritchie’s house in Frederick, Maryland is just 45 minutes from mine. Yet I had never visited it until this weekend. If you’re in the area, it’s worth the trip. Fritchie’s story is well known, I think, to anyone who attended school in my era. I suspect, however, that students of more recent vintage know nothing about it. Stories of patriotism are so passe. In 1862, Confederate »

In the latest of the Conversations with Bill Kristol, Bill sits down with his colleague Fred Barnes to review the highlights of his career covering politics in Washington, D.C. The conversation is posted and broken into chapters here. Via @KristolConvos, Bill alerts us to the fact that Fred gives a nice shout-out to Power Line in chapter 4 (at 1:22:00). Coincidentally, we’re observing the thirteenth anniversary of our life online »

In observance of Memorial Day 2007 the Wall Street Journal published a characteristically brilliant column by Peter Collier to mark the occasion. The column remains accessible online here. I don’t think we’ll read or hear anything more thoughtful or appropriate to the occasion today. Here it is: Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the »

At Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende and David Byler explicate their index of party strength. To compute their index, Trend and Byler calculate five components, which they weight equally: Our index is the sum of five parts: presidential performance, House performance, Senate performance, gubernatorial performance and state legislative performance. The first is measured by the party’s performance in the previous presidential popular vote (NB: In this, and all other measurements, »

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, one of the markers on the way to U.S. entry into World War I. George Will wrote about it the other day in his column, coming close but not quite embracing some of the old rumors and conspiracy charges that the British wanted the Lusitania sunk in hopes of getting the U.S. off the sidelines: It is commonly but »

PBS’s American Experience series broadcast Rory Kennedy’s documentary film “Last Days in Vietnam” on April 28. You can watch the entire film online at the link; clips and other resources are accessible here. PBS has posted 17 clips from the film on YouTube here. I would post the whole thing here if I could, but I don’t think I can. Prefaced by a 30-second message, the opening of the film »

There are surprisingly few recollections under way today of the final ignominious chapter of our Vietnam agony, when the U.S. was chased out of Saigon. I wonder if there isn’t a larger subtext here. We not only seem to be re-running the 1960s at home right now (Ferguson, Baltimore, etc), but we seem to be trying to re-run 1970s foreign policy too, with American retreat leading to chaos, instability, and »

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign—ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand, since they provided the bulk of the troops for this ill-fated venture that became known as “Churchill’s Folly.” Anyone who has seen the early Mel Gibson film, Gallipoli, will know that the operation ended up with the same kind of trench warfare and appalling slaughter that characterized the Western Front. The British »

I made the horrid mistake of channel-surfing to C-SPAN Senate coverage a couple days ago just in time to catch Sen. Babs “Don’t-Call-Me-Ma’am” Boxer bloviating about some public letter by “very smart people” backing up Obama’s Iran negotiations. Just then the batteries on my remote conked out, and I had to get up and walk over to the TV to change the channel, just like our great grandparents had to »

Sen. Tom Cotton recently told Jeffrey Goldberg that it is unfair to Neville Chamberlain to compare his appeasement of Hitler to Barack Obama’s appeasement of Iran. Chamberlain, Tom reminded us, had been told that the British military was unprepared to fight Germany. Thus, he was in a position of weakness. President Obama, by contrast, is in a position of military strength. The Senator is right insofar as the issue is »

On this 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn performs a public service today rebutting the relentless liberal/“Progressive” attempts to pry Lincoln from the Republican Party and claim that Lincoln, were he alive today, would surely be a Progressive Democrat: On this the 150th anniversary of the day John Wilkes Booth fired his fatal bullet at Ford’s Theater, we have a consensus: Today’s Republicans have no »

It has been a couple of months since Barack Obama suggested that the Crusades were somehow on a par with, or even a justification for, 21st-century Islamic terrorism. I objected to Obama’s casual slur at the link, saying, among other things: There was nothing wrong, in principle, with the Crusades. They were an appropriate (if belated and badly managed) response to the conquest of the Holy Land by Islam. Did »

Today is the 150th anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, ending our Civil War. Carl Cannon observes the occasion in this RealClearPolitics column as does Jarrett Stepman in a good Breitbart column. To these columns I would only like to append a brief literary footnote. Bruce Catton’s three-volume history of the Army of the Potomac concludes with Catton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Stillness at »

In his latest book Revolt Against the Masses, Fred Siegel offers a novel explanation for the roots and character of modern liberalism—one that differs substantially from my own in many ways. On page 28 of the book he says, “Modern liberalism was born of a discontinuity, a rejection of Progressivism.” In this installment of our conversation, Fred explains some key parts of his argument here, and he makes a good »

In this third installment, Fred extends his observations on the Vietnam controversies in the 1960s, the rise of feminism, and current Israeli politics (this video was taped before the recent election). He also comments on his time with the Democratic Leadership Council, and Michael Walzer of Dissent. He concludes with some choice comments on Howard Dean and John Kerry. About 7:30 long: »

I missed Marc Thiessen’s Washington Post column a couple days ago recalling the time a senator named Joe Biden . . . hmmm, that name seems familiar, doesn’t it?—teamed up with Sen. Jesse Helms (!!!) to interpose themselves in the Clinton Administration’s diplomacy regarding the UN’s International Criminal Court: Biden also surely remembers how in 1998, when the Clinton administration was negotiating a U.N. treaty to create an International Criminal »